FOODY ANDY TO THE RESCUE!

Baking with Love

There isn’t a better feeling for a mother to hear her son say “Mama, instead of buying something can we bake something”?

This question was posed to me this week by my 15yr old teenage son. Tomorrow Friday is my son’s Marksmanship Coach’s birthday and his team wanted to make something special for him.

He embarked on the mission to find out what his favourite sweet treat was and came back with an answer I didn’t expect for this time of year. “Ma, his favorite is Pumpkin Pie but you need to remember he is diabetic so you can’t put too much sugar, ok!”

I checked out a few recipes and settled on this one that used a lovely flaky crust made with sour cream and went by the name of Old Fashioned Pumpkin Pie. The recipe calls for some sugar for desserts, but I left the sugar out to be a bit more diabetic oriented!

2 cups of flour

1 tsp of salt

2 sticks of cubed unsalted butter

1/2 cup sour cream)

I made my son do all the work and just made sure to oversee the process just in case….. 🙂

Once he had the dough made we rolled it out and put it in the fridge to chill for a bit.

The he started working on the filling, which once again, we skimped on the sugar and upped the spices in order to make it diabetic friendly ❤

2 whole eggs plus 1 yolk

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup white sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons of cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/4 teaspoon ground all spice

1/2 teaspoon of lemon zest

2 cups of canned pumpkin purée (no time to make the real thing)

1 1/2 cup heavy cream

It was really nice watching my son’s face and he got a whiff of all the spices. He doesn’t like pumpkin but did agree than once all the spices are in, it makes pumpkin totally likeable!

We took the dough out, placed it in our pie dish and filled it with the lovely pie filling.

Into the oven it went and whilst it was baking away, we spelt out 1st Sergeant with the left over dough and baked that too to use as the pie topping 🙂 And yes we forgot about the “st” next for 1st so we had to bake another set of letters! lol

Now I have one proud teenage boy, who together with his entire team will present their coach 1st Sergeant Rodriguez from South Plantation High School, his favorite dessert on his birthday, with his diabetes in mind!

I got my dough together and then formed them into small balls, placed on to un-greased baking sheet and baked them for 10-12 minutes at 375 deg F

My first batch which I baked for exactly 12 minutes came out a bit pale and they did not do the melty thingy that regular cookies do, so I had to smush them down with a spoon to flatten them a bit and I baked them for an extra 2 minutes.

The second batch I left them in for 15 minutes and they came out with a more golden color but still had to apply the smushing technique!

They are very crumbly and have a different texture but they taste quite good.

Not sure if this is something I would indulge in but for those of you who cannot eat gluten, they are the perfect treat to go with a cup of tea.

A very wise friend made me aware of the fact that June 29th is National Waffle Iron day which of course means, we need to make some waffles for dinner or dessert!

Dessert won, I am technically half Belgium so Maple Belgium Waffles are in the making to celebrate such an amazing day :-), any excuse for waffles right?

So I made this rich and light fluffy batter with the following ingredients:

2 cups of flour

3/4 cup of sugar

3 1/2 tsp of baking powder

2 eggs (separate whites from yolks)

1 1/2 cups of milk

1 cup of butter (2 sticks)

1 tsp vanilla extract or maple extract ( I used maple today)

Put all dry ingredients in a bowl, separate eggs and beat the yolks with the melted butter, milk and vanilla or maple extract. Add to dry ingredients until nicely combined. Beat the egg whites to a peak and gently fold into the batter!

My son wanted a white and milk chocolate chips in his so he got a special one made just for him.

I served mine with fresh strawberry syrup, fresh blueberries and a dusting of powdered sugar and a some mint leaves to make it pretty 🙂

Anyway, there is nothing else left to say other than “Happy Waffle Iron Day” ❤